


From The Latin Infinitus

by tb_ll57



Category: Vampire Chronicles - All Media Types, Vampire Chronicles - Anne Rice
Genre: Alternate Ending, Fix-It of Sorts, Gap Filler, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-12
Updated: 2015-01-19
Packaged: 2018-02-12 19:23:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,910
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2121762
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tb_ll57/pseuds/tb_ll57
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A series of four shorts, deviating from <i>The Body Thief</i>, <i>Memnoch The Devil</i>, <i>Merrick</i>, and <i>Prince Lestat</i>, respectively.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Body Thief: Stealing Glimmers of Sanity in Crazed Days

At last David hung up. 'They’ll fax information to the hotel as soon as they receive it,' he said, so calm he could have been speaking of a broker, not a dangerous thief of bodies and lives. 'Let’s go there, shall we? I myself am famished. I’ve been here all night long, waiting. Oh, and that dog. What will you do with that splendid dog?'

It was all so mundane, so nauseatingly normal. When had conversation between us ever been normal? Certainly I had never had the patience for it. And David was too cultured, too intelligent for banality. But that steady stream of it came from his well-formed mouth, and his mind was closed to me so that I couldn’t see past the words.

'He’s had breakfast,' I answered my friend. 'He’ll be happy in the roof garden. You’re very anxious to be out of these rooms, aren’t you? Why don’t we simply get into bed together? I don’t understand.'

He coloured slightly, a delicate little darkening of his cheeks that delighted me. Had I caught him off his careful guard? A rare triumph even for me. David stood still, facing me there, and then he said, 'You’re serious?'

I shrugged my hands. 'Of course.' Serious! I was beginning to be obsessed with the simple little possibility. Making love before anything else happened. Seemed like a marvellous idea!

Again, he fell to staring in that maddening fashion. I could see that he was thinking of it, what it would be like. Of what had been possible between us from the first meeting, but impossible until now. And I knew that he was very attracted to this body, but that even more than that it was me.

For a brief but very intense moment I remembered the look of Nicki, the only man I’d loved while I was alive, the boy really who had been my other half until his darkness parted us for always. I was remembering the last time we had been together as lovers, the night that Magnus took me and my mortal life; and I was remembering the hatred Nicki spat at me, and I wondered if I had lived that night, might we have been happy at least a while longer.

The softness of David’s murmur made his tenderness all the more hurtful. 'He was dead long before you met him, Lestat,' he said.

'You don’t know that,' I returned. 'You know nothing about him except what I’ve written, or what you’ve stolen out of my thoughts.'

'I know you chose Louis to be your fledgling because of what happened with Nicki.'

I think I realised then that I didn’t want sex anymore. Or rather I did, my new mortal body was all undeterred by this exchange between David and my old self. I was very sad; but I was also very glad that it was David here with me, and not Louis or Marius or Armand, who would think I exaggerated as they always do. But none of them had ever been so alone in their mortal lives, needing so much the love I’d thought I’d had from Nicki.

An extraordinary change came over David’s expression. 'Yes,' he said, 'that’s it, isn’t it?'

'I wish you wouldn’t read my mind, it’s very rude.'

'I wish you wouldn’t keep the important things from me, my friend.' He lifted a gentle hand to my face. 'It is you in there, isn’t it.'

It was I who blushed, turning hot and tingly from my hairline to my neck. 'You knew that already,' I told him brusquely.

I had an image of us in the bed together, and it wasn’t from me this time. David was in awe of me and yet he had never held me in awe, it was this lovely thing we were doing together, this mortal thing that was messy and wonderful. And he was seeing me with my golden hair, my mouth that was too wide to be entirely perfect, my hands that were a boy’s hands, unlined and smooth, tanned from the sun and gentle on him. And we kissed in his image, a human kiss, not the vampiric one I had threatened and promised, and on my face was an expression of such vulnerability that I was stunned breathless.

'This is how you see me?' I whispered.

A corner of his lips lifted in a wry smile. 'That is how you are, my friend,' he said. 'I think the only one who hasn’t seen it is you.'

'I don’t think I like it.'

Another image of me, as fancifully crafted as the first, but more detailed so that I knew it was a memory. Me, burnt a dark brown by the Gobi sun, stretched face-down on the tiger skin, all taut lines and sharp bones like a painting, and David sitting beside me as I slept, his hand roving tenderly over my back and flank.

 _Pervert,_ I thought, and I felt him smile in his mind at me.

_I suppose you’ve been rubbing off on me after all._

'Do I have to be hurt for you to love me?' I asked aloud.

The question, honest and curious as it was, shocked him. 'Of course not,' he answered quickly. 'Why do you ask that?'

I waved a hand as if to encompass his telepathic imagery. 'My mother, Marius, Louis. You. Only when you see me wounded and hurt do you love me like that.' I couldn’t explain why this distressed me, except that it did and I wished he’d shown me a different memory. But then Louis’ awful lies about my crassness in his horrid book hadn’t made me happy, either. Could I be anything but cruel or helpless?

'You are,' said David, 'everything that any human has ever been. But writ enormous and untempered, a vast tidal wave of feeling that drives you to extremes. My modern sensibility makes me deny your viciousness, but if you didn’t have that, you wouldn’t be beautiful in your need, I suppose.' He put his hand around the back of my neck, and drew my head toward his until our foreheads touched. 'Underneath the Vampire, there’s Lestat. I can’t help that I love that, you know.'

'All of this was much easier when I was worm food,' I muttered. He chuckled even as he kissed me, and I felt drawn into it despite wanting to be sad. It might have been easier, I mused, but then I hadn’t known David while I was beneath the earth, and if I hadn’t ever known him, I wouldn’t have this right now, and this was good.


	2. Memnoch The Devil: Red Devil Rehab

'Thank you for meeting me.'

Louis managed a small nod, but only of automatic courtesy. The man who sat facing him looked no older than twenty-five. His dark hair was curly and fashionable, a small gold earring winked in the soft left lobe. He had round eyes, very wide and lovely, the sort of eyes used to accompanying a smiling mouth. There was a smile there, but it was cunning, a little cruel, set in cynicism.

Nicolas de Lenfent said, 'You don’t look like me. Somehow I always thought you would.'

His French was a little archaic. It was the same French that Lestat spoke. That, more even than the looks, convinced Louis. He ought to have been relieved, but he was not. A sinking feeling in what had been his stomach deepened.

'Then you don’t know him very well,' he replied, when he realised he had sat in silence for too long. 'But somehow, I was sure of that.'

Nicki’s thin lips turned down. He leaned forward over their little café table, the whisper of his wool jacket against the table a quiet distraction. He pressed thin musician’s fingers to the greasy table-top. Louis, looking at those white digits, imagined calluses from wooden instruments and horse-hair strings. He imagined gentle touches and wondering caresses. Perhaps Nicki did not know Lestat de Lioncourt very well; but Louis did. He could look at those hands and understand why Lestat had loved this man.

'Tell me something, Creole,' Nicki hissed. Though his voice was almost no more than a breath it was like thunder in Louis’s ears. 'Does he know that I’m alive?'

Louis raised his gaze to Nicki’s face, searching for the tell-tale lines left by human existence, and finding only smoothness. Again it was nearly a minute before he recalled that he had not answered. 'He knows nothing,' he said, barely hearing himself. 'He sleeps.'

This seemed to come as a great shock to Nicki. 'He has gone into the earth?'

'He lies as a statue in a chapel. Like a marble saint.' It was ironic and yet inevitable. The sight of Lestat lying stiller than death on the wooden floor before the altar never failed to inspire both laughter and reverence. As Lestat had been paralysed by his visions, so Louis had been paralysed by him. Time would, perhaps, pass; but Louis knew already that he had become an acolyte to the new Vampire God. He would, as Marius had once done, bring flowers and incense to the lonely temple; he would worship silently, daily, playing video recordings, reading books to his silent maker. Something in that thought pleased him.

He had drifted alone in his own imaginings. Nicki was staring at him in anger and revulsion. Louis offered his blandest expression.

'Why now?' he asked, not truly caring, but from a sense he ought to ask.

Nicki fell back in his chair, but his posture did not relax. 'There is no Armand now,' he said only.

Louis understood. Armand the savage jailor. He remembered well. And could picture the unrevealing expression Armand would wear when questioned. If. Armand was dead, or at least vanished. No-one had sought him.

'He wouldn’t have made you if he believed I was alive.'

It was said spitefully, to hurt. It didn’t. And already Louis found himself losing the drift of the conversation, his mind in the chapel with its silent occupant, unmoving after so many years. Not even David returned any more. Only Louis. Who wondered idly if perhaps Akasha’s throne could be found, and Lestat made to sit in it.

'Perhaps a crown of thorns?' Nicolas added.

Louis did not reply, undisturbed that Nicki had penetrated his private thoughts. The other vampire, his brother, came toward him again, his white face flushed with blood, his lips pink with life, his eyes malicious.

'Do you know how frightened he always was?' Nicki said softly. Like a whisper of breeze his preternatural voice wrapped about Louis. 'Of everything wicked. Of the wickedness in himself. He loved beauty but he could not abide ugliness. How he would weep. Alone in the dark. He would reach for me and I would pretend to be asleep. His every wound was open and bleeding and raw. I wanted to wash my hands in his blood.' Louis closed his eyes and felt the derranged tenor of the voice that enveloped him, absorbing it without thinking about the meaning of the sounds. 'I wanted to plunge my hands into him and pull him apart to pieces. What a cripple he was. All light and golden and terrified of the shadows. I wanted to watch him wither before he died.'

He had seen Lestat at the ebb of his strength. That withered thing of madness and pain. Lying on the floor of the house on Prytania Street in New Orleans amidst the filth of decades, a book clutched in skeletal hands to a sunken chest.

'Books,' Nicki said. 'He always loved books. The symbol of his ignorance. Of his unworthiness. That bitch he called Maman would never teach him to read. He would have died an illiterate savage if not for Magnus.'

Magnus. Louis woke a little at the name. The name he had asked for a hundred, a thousand times. To be met with a look he had believed sullen.

'It should have been me.' Nicki stared into the mirror behind Louis’s head, the wall made of mirrors that reflected even their vampire images. The brutal hardness in his eyes reflected, too. He looked back to Louis. 'Then Lestat could have died as he was meant to. Died a saint. A _good person._ '

Louis felt moved to make an answer. His lips worked before he found a sound to match them. 'Yes.'

'You know,' Nicki said. 'I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s happy, now.'

It was the first thing the other vampire had said that resonated with Louis. He agreed, without noise or movement. But Nicki understood.

When Louis roused himself to look about, he was alone.


	3. Merrick: Truths Unchanged, Texts Unchanging

Torches had been lighted throughout the house. Doors lay open. Windows were uncovered as they looked out over the firmament and the sea.

Magnificent Grecian urns stood on pedestals in the corridors, great bronze statues from the Orient in their various niches, exquisite plants bloomed at every window and terrace open to the sky. Gorgeous rugs from India, Persia, China covered the marble floors wherever he walked. He came upon giant stuffed beasts mounted in life-like attitudes– the brown bear, the lion, the tiger, even the elephant standing in his own immense chamber, lizards as big as dragons, birds of prey clutching dried branches made to look like the limbs of real trees. And on the walls, brilliantly colored murals covering every surface from floor to ceiling, dominating it all.

Finally, he heard it– the unmistakable sound of the one for whom he had come. It was a low, rhythmic beat of a heart, more a feeling than a sound. He moved toward it. The room to which it led him was a brightly illuminated eighteenth-century salon– the stone walls had been covered in fine rosewood paneling, and gilded mirrors rose nearly to the ceiling. Painted Chinese desks, upholstered settees, the dark and lush landscapes, the porcelain clocks ticking softly. The ceiling-high shelf of books in soft leather binding, the narrow, high French doors open for the breeze from the bay, and the banks of white lilies and red roses perfuming the air just outside the room, and there, with his back to all of it, an eighteenth-century man.

They stood silently together, savouring the moment– that they were about to speak, that they were really there together. Would all things be known?

He went to the railing and stood beside the man he had come to speak to, glancing as he did over the sea. His companion's silhouette looked frighteningly like stone; but when he turned, the smooth face vitalised impossibly for a moment, and then they linked arms and walked back into the room, choosing chairs and sitting as gracefully as two mortal men. Natural, civilised it all was. And Marius settled comfortably on the brocade cushions and let his fingers curl around the arms of the chair.

When his companion smiled, he looked entirely human. All the lines, the animation were there until the smile melted again.

'Welcome to my home,' said Louis du Point du Lac.

Marius answered with a smile of his own. 'It is beautiful,' he replied. 'An almost... exact replica. You must have followed his book to the letter.'

Louis inclined his head. 'I found it to be a congenial task.'

'It has been many, many years since we have seen each other, my friend.'

Louis folded his hands into his lap, his slender fingers folding gently about each other. 'Yes,' he agreed. 'And yet, I never expected you to come here.'

Solemn now, Marius said honestly, 'I have never been sure if I agreed with your path.'

'Yet your long absence is the only sign of your disapproval.'

'It was still your path to travel.'

It hung between them as their mutual quiet deepened. Louis broke it.

'You once said,' he murmured, 'that it is only terrible as time goes on. But it was never beautiful.'

Marius sighed from deep within himself. 'I understand,' he answered softly.

Louis stood, self-possessed and self-contained, the folds of his black coat falling simply about his frame, his dark shining hair tied away from his pleasant eyes and pretty mouth. A creature of impossible whiteness and perfection, Marius thought, rising to join him.

'Come and see what you have come to see,' Louis said.

'I came to see you.' Marius linked his hands behind his back. 'I know what waits below.'

Louis’s polite expression did not waver. 'He waits for you. Would you deny him your presence even when you stand so close?'

'He waits for nothing, Louis.'

A single black eyebrow rose. 'As you will,' he said, but he nonetheless left the room, his intention clear. Marius resisted only a moment longer before acknowledging defeat. With a second sigh, he followed the younger vampire from that most pleasant of rooms, resisting only the deliberate familiarity of the corridors through which they walked.

 

**

 

It was not like the marble sanctuaries he had built a dozen times in the long-ago past to house two long-dead creatures. There were no frescoes, no thousand bouquets. It was only a room, and in it was a man. The chair he sat upon was not a throne, and the clothes he wore were not magnificent. He wore what he might have worn had he suddenly decided to stand up and go walking on the island outside the villa. His shirt was white, his jumper wool and thick and a luscious brown. His hair fell in gleaming, brushed waves nearly to his straight shoulders.

He sat facing an open window– a window as wide as a wall. The air blew in soft warm gusts directly on him, and into the creases of one white palm that sat, turned up, on his knee.

Marius gazed on the Vampire Lestat, and wished he did not feel the ache that he did.

'So long,' he heard himself whisper.

Louis evidenced a great economy of movement as he crossed the room. Perhaps the path had become so familiar it was no longer even conscious; five steps this way, seven that. Perhaps Louis did not shy from the monotony as Marius always had. He lit six candles with the same set of gestures– lift the match, light the match, light the wick, snuff the match. And then he came to a precise stop beside the chair, and laid one hand on Lestat’s shoulder.

'Marius has come to see you,' he said gently.

For several seconds Marius held himself tensely, hoping– expecting?– animation from that still, still form. But as a minute ticked past, a breath he hadn’t realised he was holding escaping him, disappointment filled him instead. He had been a fool to look for any change.

If Louis noticed, and it seemed he had, he made no mention. To Lestat, he added, 'It has been a very long time since we’ve seen him. He must have missed us.'

'This is grotesque,' Marius said suddenly. 'Louis, I beg you, let us leave him.'

The expression on Louis’s ascetic face was unreadable, perhaps a little sad. 'He is not Those Who Must Be Kept,' the vampire said, with that even, unflappable inflection. 'He is a friend. A friend who sleeps in comfort and safety until he wakes.'

'And if he never wakes?' Marius pushed, a rush of furious energy filling him. He crossed the room to stand directly before Louis, with the immobile Lestat still as granite between them. 'If this solitary vigil becomes the sole purpose of your existence?'

The tiniest of smiles broke in a wave over Louis’s face. 'It always was,' the other man told him tenderly. He turned his face down to Lestat’s, lifting his hand to stroke the shining hair.

 

**

 

Marius stood at the bow of his ship, relishing the life in the salty spray that was whipped into the air by their passing. He watched without regret as the villa perched on the beach head receded from his vision, each breath coming easier as the distance between himself and its lonely occupants grew.

He knew he would never return there. His own ghosts were still too close to him, the lingering scent of millennia of thankless servitude too deeply ingrained. Perhaps, he could admit, Louis was more suited to this task than he had ever been. He had sensed no unhappiness. And when he had gathered himself enough to make a courteous good-bye, he had seen only the contentment of a life lived as it was meant to be.

When he would again see Louis du Point du Lac, he couldn’t guess. One day, perhaps, Louis would do what he had never been able to do, and he would walk away from his eternal watch. Or maybe Lestat really would wake. Marius had not held that hope for centuries, but who knew. Maybe one day there would be another young vampire, more daring than any others of his kind, unable to resist a challenge.

When he could no longer hear the steady beat of the heart, Marius turned and went inside his cabin.


	4. Prince Lestat: Stick To The Tambourine

Because he is occasionally very foolish, Lestat believes Nicolas will return.

Well, because all the others did. Even the ghost of his maker Magnus, who has so long ceased to be real to him, all part of the myth he wrote of himself, and dim memory besides. It seems as if the entire cast of all his books were merely laying in wait for his latest adventure, a-- what do they call it, a reunion episode, yes? He is the star of some late-night cable talkie, and all the telegenic vampires of his past are called one by one to the stage and there they laugh and greet each other with kisses to pale cheeks, warm embraces, and the host calls another, another, another, til his whole life is gathered there around him. All is smiles and forgiveness.

Of course it is not, and Nicolas does not, and because Lestat must take foolishness to the same extreme he does everything else, this hurts him far more than he expects it to.

He clings more than he might have to Alessandra, Queen of the dirty mediaeval coven of Les Innocents, and to Eleni and Eugenie, who of course he knew somewhat more, from the early days of the Theatres des Vampires. Armand has returned from the death of the undead nearly as many times as Lestat, though to have anything in common with the vile little viper is a thing of difficulty between them still. Lestat tries to be patient with this, and to his surprise Amel's counsel in dealing with Armand is wise-- respect does not come easy to either of them, distance is all too natural, but neither state is useful now in this new Vampire Government Lestat is building. So for the sake of so many ancient grudges he keeps the women away from their old coven master, but he also keeps himself apart from them. To Armand he gives the duty of shadowing the Old Ones, and of long-suffering David he asks a secretary's role, to flatter Armand's very real importance and influence. Together they will collect the tales of such long lives, and no more the games of human publishers and mortal science fiction scrims. They need their histories written for the good of their new community, and Armand takes to this task with appropriate solemnity.

The ghost of Magnus is, of course, an issue, how could it not be, and here again Amel's words are wise. Lestat's nature is to pick and worry at a thing til it must be confronted. Conquered. It is unfinished, this not-quite-apology between them, and he has questions, so many questions. That Magnus hovers at the edge of his Court in Auvergne so clearly waiting for the opportunity is added strain; that Magnus seems to find no like difficulty in reconciling with Benedict, the vampire from whom he stole the Dark Gift, is so much the worst. That Magnus is not at all the bent and wicked creature who ripped him from life and answered no questions and yet gave him so much is a strange and distressing thing that cannot be wholly accounted in Lestat's mind, but whenever he tries to begin, the words curdle on his tongue. Are his memories wrong? Has he lied? Not only to himself, but in the books that began it all. Even Louis finds it easy to sit hour by hour with Magnus, low whispers that chase Lestat from room to room in his father's old chateau. He listens, he cannot help but listen, but the words rattle around in his head and he cannot wring sense from them.

His initial delight in Antoine's resurrection is tempered by the haunting of other old unanswerable questions. Antoine, his fine musician of the rich old Creole nights of New Orleans. Of Antoine he remembers lace kerchiefs and velvet flowers, he remembers the tender strain of music played by the hour to soothe him. Thick pulpy paper on which Antoine's ink had scratched night after night, that beautiful cipher of musical notes that Lestat could not read, would not read, but had drowned in Antoine's feverish rendering nonetheless. But Antoine is all mistake from introduction to final coda. Even in the old days Antoine had been replacement for something Lestat had known was broken, and even in the old days Antoine had been inadequate to that well of need Lestat could never fill with blood, with money, with love, no matter how he tried. No, Antoine was not the mistake-- Lestat was the mistake. Everything he'd done in those dark days had gone so very twisted. To shape a mortal with your vampiric mind and then bring him over is to tame a mouse to eagerly feed the cat. Was not Armand proof of that? Antoine is so eager for his merest crumb of attention, trailing him through the chateau, never intrusive, always there. Shall I play for you? Antoine asks him, over and over, and though Lestat would desperately wish him gone he cannot banish Antoine away with Armand, who always takes Lestat's broken fledgelings. No, he must be better, do better.

He dreams, in the paralysis of the Sleep, of Claudia. But that is familiar, isn't it. Claudia was never really gone. He doesn't truly look for her ghost, because he knows she would not return for him. If Louis looks for her bright curls and sweet oval face, he doesn't say so, and Lestat does not ask.

But surely it was not too much to hope for Nicolas. He never saw the ashes, did he.

Ah, such sweet torment. He is too much the fool, and he suspects the others all know it. Gabrielle especially, his mother who despises her own instincts to understand him, but out of obligation does as she has done for him every few decades and lets him believe for a while that things will be different. When she comes upon him weeping silently in the library, she lets him rest his head on her knee, and the next day wears her hair down for him, and the day after that she takes Antoine under her wing and gives him a few days of peace. He treasures her effort, but from then begins to count down the days til her next disappearance.

He does weep. All that is new about that is that Amel is there, now, and when the storm passes and leaves him drained, he is not as alone as before.

It takes a few weeks. The day comes when he does not wake immediately thinking of Nicolas, and not long after that a day or two will pass before he thinks of Nicolas apropos of nothing. Nearing a month, when all the faces at the chateau are now quite familiar and the newness of the Court has worn off, he stops looking for Nicolas to pop out of corners. Belle surprise! Mon amour, je suis en retard, désolé! Désolé. But there is no French spoken at the Court, even in the heart of French countryside. His international gathering of lords and lady vampires speak elegant modern English, and that helps him forget the face that never joins their salons.

 _What is this feeling?_ Amel asks, curious to the last, cataloguing each excruciating shade of what he feels, how he feels, how lasting is that feeling, and the long slow fade of heartache he is unwilling to hurry.

 _I am inappropriate,_ Lestat replies, but does not truly answer. _Ask anyone._

Deliciously, Amel conveys something that feels like an epic eye-roll. Lestat laughs for very nearly the first time since it all began to happen. And after that he is a little better, and after he is a little better it is a steady climb out of grief, because he is terribly resilient, even when he doesn't want to be.

There are no secrets, anymore, with Amel, but this one last thing is his alone, and if that has anything to do with anything, then eventually he will learn to live with it. But even at his best his faith is a fickle thing, finding root in all the wrong places, and Lestat is very good at believing the wrong things. He puts his hope aside, and refuses to look directly at it, but it never really goes away.

Not really.


End file.
